Rock And Roll Is King, Excessive Consumption Production

A few slower days as I transition from programming to music. The Snow Business project has one day to go, so I've started to enquire about a presentation event.

Yesterday was spent testing Gunstorm II, and wandering around Crewe a little, following on from some Sunday shopping.

Today has been full work on the recordings of Excessive Consumption, and particularly 'Rock and Roll is King'. My music creation work now reflects that of my paintings, lots of fine detail that takes hours of refinement. Many hours today was spent, for example, on the hi-hat patterns of 'rock. This is an early example of a tune written primarily as a backing track to perform to, but of course it will be added to for a full recording. It's notable as a 1950s-style rock and roll song for having no guitar (yet, at least). I have planned for one in Excessive Consumption though.

Each day I've been practicing the blues track, Pictures On My Telephone. Blues in chord structure it might be, but this song has more of the mood of a cowboy song. I'll be playing this entirely on piano and singing, which makes it more difficult to perform. I'd like to shout it more, express more, and this needs more drill to master it to a good enough degree. Musically it's extremely simple, as is Rock and Roll. I'm reminded that on guitar the song would be much easier to perform than on piano, and this, as well as portability and performance image (greater visibility of the performer, freedom to move etc.), may explain why the guitar definitively beat the piano as a rock performance instrument; but musically the piano is superior and all of the best composers are piano players.

These songs are aimed towards the next open-mic performance, so constitute training. Each of these special and limited events must be treated as opportunities to leap upwards, both push and refine, and always improve.

The start of a month is here so I need to target a new ambition and project. One thing I need to do is complete more existing album scores. The new Salome book, my first book with sheet music, and our first as a Fall in Green book, is just about ready.

Onward.

Jamming and Organs

An exceptionally musical 24-hours at the end of a very musical week. Deb's sister is visiting and last night for a few hours we all jammed together on guitar, keyboard, and bass, interchanging instruments. It was a great night. I felt tested, pressured, and I rather like that because this is the environment of live performance. I relish fighting back. Challenge is a necessary part of growth. Most of the time I stuck to the keyboard, and the key of the music kept changing with each (unannounced) capo shift of the guitar, so I had to jump from C# Major to E Major - two keys which I (joyously) hardly ever play, so this was excellent practice.

Today I've spent much of the day working on an organ piece for a new client, a job to re-sequence an existing recording. I've made a few tweaks to the arrangement, to enhance it musically a bit. I couldn't resist adding some shifts of note during the change of triad. One key reason is that sequencing makes this easier than needing to learn to play it. I made sure it was playable though.

Then, more work on the Excessive Consumption tune, which is outstandingly funky. It's something like a Sparks song as performed by Prince.

Music Stand Mark II, Excessive Consumption

Spent much of the day finishing the music stand, here's a look:

The bolt there is a test bolt. I'll be fitting one with a handle and make a flat stopper for it to form the clamp proper.

There was a hitch. The MODX has a deep hole in the exact place were the bolt was/is due to clamp, this houses the case screws. This was hidden and unexpected, I'd have had to turn the MODX upside down to have noticed it. I'm reminded that all problems in engineering are that which is unexpected. My options are:

1. Use a longer bolt to clamp deep into the hole. Not ideal, as it's hard to get a bolt long enough, it would ideally need to be 70mm, and I wouldn't want to damage the screw with the tip. Also this would prevent moving the stand left or right to a place where there isn't a hole.
2. Put something like a 'plank' over the hole and grip into that. This works, but it can't be fixed anywhere and so could fall off and go missing easily when the stand it removed. Also the gap between the clamp and the MODX is only about 2mm, so this would needs to be very thin.
3. Shave into the stand itself to add a 'plank' of sorts there, and somehow attach it. It can't really be attached though, it shouldn't really bulge (although this very bulging strip is how my old easel connector worked). It should be a wide strip, about 10x70mm, moving perpendicular to the bolt.
4. Fill the hole in with something I can remove in future.

This isn't a serious problem as all options will work. Option 2 works well enough, but I'll have to be careful not to lose the piece of plastic I'm using to cover the hole.

When fixed, it holds the stand really tightly, and is definitely an improvement on the Mark I. I have a few ideas to improve it for a Mark III. The clamp issue aside I could make the main sheet holder pivot so that it can tilt at any angle, using a toothed gear to lock and adjust it (never friction! Those cheap mic stands which use friction never work). That would avoid the need for the long V extensions at the back, making it all smaller and more flexible.

After that I spent some time updating the Steam stores for my software, which were a little out of date. The admin with a game catalogue never really ends.

Then I started work on some backing for 'Excessive Consumption Has Laxative Affects'. It sounded rather good from the outset, but is all sequenced and I'm wondering if it needs more feeling, live play. It sounds very different from the version I played at the open mic; well, it would, I now have bass, electric piano, drums.

Pictures On My Telephone, Music Stand Mark II

Another sleepless night, but not due to dog barks this time, just uncomfortable. I feel as though my blood pressure is too high.

In the night I wrote two songs, inspired and enthused by Tuesday's open-mic. Both are tropes in a 1950s style of rock and roll and blues, a pair. The lyrics are simple, the tunes even more simple, standard fair, but they fit nicely, are easy to remember and should be enough of a push to improve live performance of this sort of material. I'm unused to playing the piano and singing at the same time. The first time I ever tried it was the Congleton Bob Dylan event, and the second time the recent We Robot performances; so certainly less than 10 songs in a live setting. I'm in a learning phase, my favourite. Exciting.

One song is called, at the moment, Rock and Roll is King, but I know of the E.L.O. song of the same name, so I'd rather avoid that title - yet it seems to be the most appropriate one. The second is called Pictures on my Telephone and is pretty easy to play. The mood is a cross between old style blues (Blueberry Hill, Blue Christmas) and a cowboy drawl or 1930s dance hall. As such, it already feels warm and friendly, fuzzy like an old friend. Here are the words. You'll note as much surrealistic humour as any of my songs:

Pictures On My Telephone

I can't get lonely without you.
When I'm alone I still feel alright
I have your pictures on my telephone
They're all I need at night

When I feel blue
and need you
up you pop
It is a thrill
to see you
I can not stop.

I can't get lonely without you.
When I'm alone I still feel alright
I have your pictures on my telephone
They're all I need at night

I've spent much of the day procrastinating when I should be producing some of these songs, but waking late and feeling tired would limit my capacity for this anyway. I've been procrastinating proactively though. My MODX music stand design has worked well enough, but in live event it's fragile, even a slight brush can make it tumble to the ground. This happened on Tuesday twice, though I caught it the second time. The sound engineer said to use gaffer tape to secure it, but no, never! I hate sticky temporary fixes. Would NASA use gaffer tape? (I ask rhetorically; I know that they did during the Apollo 13 crisis). Still, needing tape is a sign of bad design, so yesterday evening I took to the existing stand with Polymorph to make a tight fit, hopefully one which would 'click' into place. It didn't work.

Instead I came up with a new design using a bolt as a clamp, which should be more stable.

As before, it will fit a variety of 'plates', so will remain flexible. The MDF is old and slightly damp, a poor finish, but it should paint up fine.

My mother, like her father, is a tinkerer and repairer. It's from her I get my desire to fix and improve every design, but her repairs are always ugly, slapdash things. If it uses screws, each screw will be a different size and shape. Each bit of wood would be a different random part, as though the resulting design was made by a magpie. My grandfather had a home-made stepladder where every step was a totally different piece of wood and every step wobbled in a different way. It worked, just (it fell apart in the end, while a workman was atop), but certainly looked 'home made'.

For me, aesthetics are as important as functionality. An item must look beautiful, and in a performance setting presentation is even more important. Why else are pianos made in burr walnut? If I designed a synthesizer I'd make a few changes to current designs: First, the principle would be symmetry, that all controls and modulators would be available on left and right, because a keyboard is a two-handed instrument. Second, it would have a video connection so that a screen could show an image on the back, to the audience. Drums are commonly branded with the band's logo and a synth could easily be so. The cable-infested appearance of the back of most synthesizers seems to be rarely considered by the manufacturers.

Dog Induced Insomnia, Red Cow Night, Choral Ambitions

A somewhat slow and tired day yesterday, being woken at 3:30am by next door's barking dog. I fell asleep again close to 7am before being woken again by the dog at 8:30am. I spent the day preparing Gunstorm and Flatspace, listing songs, largely filing. Then I did a quick play of the music for the night's open mic event at The Red Cow, which we attended with joy and anticipation.

It was a wonderful night, the best open-mic I've attended, both in quality of music and of the audience. Everyone was so supportive of each other and the sound quality was as good as the quality of the acts which included Nigel Stonier, Virginia Kettle from Merry Hell, Nastee Chapel, and Steve van Niekerk and his sister - their song Innuendo stuck in my mind as epic, and, in my imagination, reminded me of Renaissance or even Nightwish. Egan Stonier played a memorable solo violin piece which used a looper, and many more, all excellent. I regret not noting all of the names on the night to assemble an exhaustive list!

I performed Robot, and Excessive Consumption, and Deb and I as an un-costumed Fall in Green performed Clown Face, Dead Hand, and for the first time 'Did I Request Thee, Victor, To Mould Me Man'. We got home at 11:30, more elated now than tired. I fell asleep after midnight to be, would you believe it, woken again by barking at 3:30am, staying awake until 7am as before, then woken again by barking at 8:30! Two nights with barely 3 hours of sleep each! I dislike dogs at the best of times. Dog people tend to be controlling, cat people tend to be sympathetic. Leonardo da Vinci was a cat person. Adoph Hitler was a dog person - though to the latter's credit he did poison his dog. I must add the caveat that I have several nice friends with dogs.

The resulting morning of dull-headed tiredness shot by. I released Flatspace IIk and prepared for my meeting, scheduled for that afternoon, with Matthew Plant the choir master of my old school, St. Mary's. He has a few ambitions and visions, and an enthusiasm which chimes with my own. I have a few little jobs for him which seem within my capabilities, and I'm looking forward to working with him.

My few weeks of game programming are at a close. I must now charge at art, so must form a clear plan. My performance of Excessive Consumption was under-rehearsed and full of mistakes, though the audience liked it to the extent of singing along! I want to record it.

Excessive Consumption Has Laxative Effects

A sleepless night. My recent programming phase is nearing an end, but there's a trail of things to do afterwards with these works. Still awaiting confirmations, testing and various Steam approvals. Made two changes last night: a bug-fix to Flatspace spotted by Andrew, and a fix to Gunstorm II and the achievements which didn't trigger. I'll probably set back its release to give the first Gunstorm game time to create traction.

A tired day today. I'll move back to music, and sheet music I think. Some jobs are done in the hope of money, like these games, like new books, or other things I might sell. Paintings or music generally are more 'artistic'. They will probably sell (or create income) eventually, but there's no shop or direct way to earn, so they are a medium to long term investment. Thirdly there are jobs like my sheet music or updating my game engine; hard work yet completely fruitless in even the medium term, yet likely to be of benefit in the centuries after my death! Life isn't really geared to reward people for this sort of long-termism.

I played some keyboard today, to one of Mike's songs, and sent him the results. My repairs on his Zoom recorder seems to have worked. It might work better now than it ever did, as the back of the power switch seemed to be mangled, defective in its manufacture from the start.

There's an open-mic event tonight which Deb and I will attend to see what it's like. I've written a few songs recently. Here's one inspired by the notice on many confections now that 'Excessive consumption has laxative effects' - due to the sorbitol. My song is largely in one note and comes alive for the chorus. I wrote many drafts of lyrics, many scenarios, here initially inspired by an early Father Ted episode about enduring sitting silently in a room with a visitor; but the key part is the tension which is ever present and explodes in the chorus. Musically it's trivial, 4 chords and barely melodic. I may record this, and may perform it tonight.

The living room
The frozen cheese plant
The awkward silence
With her, and her
The clock is ticking
So very loudly
So very slowly
There's no escape

Excessive consumption has laxative effects
That's what the sign said
t-t-t-time will tell

They want to kill me
Or want to love me
The door is closed
The air is close, and waiting
I'm under pressure
To be accomodating
We pray together
Through silent gritted teeth!

Excessive consumption has laxative effects
That's what the sign said
t-t-t-time will tell

Excessive consumption (laxative effects)
Excessive consumption (laxative effects)
Excessive consumption (laxative effects)
Excessive consumption (laxative effects)

t-t-t-time will tell

Flatspace IIk v1.09

A final day updating the Flatspace engine. There were a few things to investigate today. The key one was that the text for item descriptions was overlapping incorrectly. This turned out to be a bug in TEXTFILE::printmesscolumnated() which was more up to date in Flatspace. In fact, I don't think it ever worked in the old textfile routines, so this meant a copy over an update of the routines and skeleton again.

I also upgraded the starfield texture and started to work on updating the nebulae, but it looks like these were all hand adjusted in Photoshop, so I'd have to spend days on it. Here's the complete list of changes:

-Engine update to Hector v1.33, including new initialisation, main loops, timer processing, numberofruns, and initialisation order.
-Fix to initialisation and alttab to address video lockout bug, with new robustinit flag.
-New full set of control keys and control text. Text is now definitively ANSI.
-New 167-character fonts.
-New input-only Options.txt and persistent Bank.txt files, replacing Config.txt. Existing options will be (and need to be) reset to defaults.
-New starfield texture.
-New fixaspect flag to stretch rather than crop display, and new standardised handling of aspect ratio.
-New mouse pointer and sensitivity set to match current standard.
-Steam Cloud support for settings and graveyard. Saved games are not sent to the cloud to permit restoration of older saves.


All of this means that I've not updated Gunstorm (gulp) for the first time in days, so (gulp) it might be that it's actually finished and ready. So, both Gunstorms, Flatspace, and the Hector engine seem to be finally updated. Working on these four things simultaneously has its benefits. I tended to spot an error in one, and fix in all four, but it's somewhat taxing as a way of working.

I'm now waiting for Andrew top give it a spin. It looks like I didn't release the We Robot Music Pack update as planned - I just forgot, so the new tracks there will also go live with this new update.

Mostly Flatspace IIk Upgrades

Another amazingly busy day programming, as the title says, largely upgrading Flatspace IIk. The graphics engine is already 90% the latest one, but not entirely, and it takes a lot of care to upgrade each bit. In the end, most of it needed changing to some extent. I've added a new mouse pointer too, the one used in the new Gunstorm, and new mouse handling routines to standardise the GUI across all games.

The day started with Gunstorm I though, and then a first Steam release of Gunstorm II. I wanted the default speed to be 75%, hence the update, but later in the day discovered a bug in Flatspace which needed a Gunstorm update too. The old 'freeze' bug when using the Desktop resolution occurred when using alt-tab, so I added my fix to that.

In Flatspace, the icons and text are the hard parts, standardising the aspect ratio. Now, in my current engine, there aren't many programmatical differences between screen aspects. I code for 4:3, and shrink fonts and icons sideways for wider screens, then set the perspective to match. The result is a screen which looks, in proportions, identical. In Flatspace though I also stretch some things vertically. Some things stretched, some shrunk, making taffy from my GUI!

I've spent the evening trying to standardise it, so have increased the icon height by 33%, but applied the shrink rules to the text and other fixed objects. In Flatspace I can't do that with the icons because in Gunstorm (and my other games) the icons are centred, but in Flatspace they have a top-left origin, so if I shrink them, they'll shrink to the top left. Annoying; so I can't shrunk them, and the code is so complex that dimensional changes are not easy to calculate. I did, however, create a new font 33% bigger to match. Here is the old Flatspace in 1280x1024:

The first new version had a better fitting font (note the letters are closer together):

But the latest one has a bigger font all round, and those vertically stretched icons:

This looks better I think, much chunkier and easier to read. This was actually really time consuming to do! There are no constants or defines for the measurements of anything, and the many text routines seem to use real numbers all over the place. Because neither the icons or fonts are centred, changing the font size means tedious experimentation to put the text in the middle of everything. It took about an hour just to get the new size there, and the work of this means that slight changes (like making the font 10% smaller) are too awkward.

All of this isn't a problem with later games. My newer, standardised GUI system as used in Gunstorm (or Future Snooker/Pool, and I think and hope Taskforce) is much easier to do everything with.

Well, I have at least another day of work, probably a week, on this - sigh! I can't wait to move on.

The back roof of my mouth has erupted with yet another huge blood-blister. It seems that coffee and crisps are a causative combination. I now await two more weeks of pain, and perhaps inability to talk.

Well, onwards we must roll our rock. Speaking of rock and roll, there's a new open mic event starting this week. We plan to attend.

Gunstorm and Flatspace IIk

A welcome rest day yesterday, a long awaited trip to Sandbach for a break.

Gunstorm is complete and approved. There was a query about controller support, but the game is designed for mouse/keyboard control, so rather than changing the game to add automatic controller support, I changed the description to 'partial support'. The game can be played fully using it but some elements are clunky; you must set up the controls first, the game won't pause if the controller is unplugged, etc. I can do these things, but it felt messy to have fully customisable game controls, but force some controller buttons to be fixed. I didn't want the default controls set to a controller because Gunstorm, like first person shooters, plays best with the mouse.

I spent yesterday morning and all of today looking at the Flatspace IIk code, slowly upgrading the engine to the latest one as used in Gunstorm. The hardest bit is the text support, there is a LOT of text in Flatspace IIk, and Hector v1.33 uses bytes rather than chars for text, so a lot of casting was needed. It's a bit of a nightmare as some areas use chars, some bytes, and as the game works as it is. I'm tempting fate and destruction to toy with it, but having the most up-to-date engine there will fix any bugs I've fixed before. Little benefits so far are that the font now includes all European language letters (167 characters, up from 127), the lens-flares have doubled in resolution, and the control options have increased, with all keys plus mouse and controller (and potentially up to 4 mice and 4 controllers).

The aspect-ratio handling was always a bit sap-dash and panicky. I use a 4:3 screen, which is very rare now. The game was designed for it in 2003, when 4:3 was the standard. I much prefer this shape of screen, and this now gives me an advantage because I can program for both aspects. For Gunstorm I developed the game for 4:3, but chop off the top on 16:9, which is how I play it. It does make the game more difficult, but looks consistent between screens. Flatspace isn't. It looks fine on 16:9 but stretches everything vertically on 4:3, making the spacing gappy. Perhaps I can address this.

One reason for doing this is that if I ever made Flatspace 3 I will need to. I couldn't use the patched, hybrid new-and-old engine, but it would need to be all-new. Flatspace was the first game with my complex menu system, which is super easy now and much better than the complex one Flatspace uses. I don't think I'll be able to upgrade this.

Next things to upgrade are the Options, then look at that aspect ratio. This, I think, I hope, will be the most difficult game to update, partly because it so big that testing it is very difficult. I can see if it 'looks like it works' but there could be screens and options in there that are already corrupt. I'm worried about the text conversion already as things like character names in save files might be affected.

Gunstorm II and Soundtracks, Zoom Q3 Repair

A few things done today, a day filled with computer admin work. The day started by preparing the Steam store for Gunstorm II which involved lots of online form filling, sizing graphics etc.

Then, preparation of The Gunstorm Soundtrack, making the Gunstorm E.P. available on Steam, which will be listed as part of the first Gunstorm game. This process took an extraordinary amount of time and work. New graphics were needed, new descriptions, and preparations of new uploads in mp3 and wav format for the album. Integrating it all with Steam took lots of time and complexity too; there are system requirements, content ratings, and all sorts of things, as well as album basics like track lists and credits, track times, cover artwork. I took the opportunity to revise the Flatspace and Flatspace II Soundtrack albums there too, so these now feature music in both mp3 and wav format, and updated some of the descriptions and other things. Before now, these albums were supplied in mp3 only, I think the 'high-quality' format option is relatively new.

This all took until about 4:30pm.

In the day, during break times, I worked a little on the repair for Mike's Zoom Q3. The main power switch was/is faulty, but also the catch for the battery compartment. Yesterday, I sawed a couple of angles of aluminium to make a mould to make a plastic catch from Polymorph (Polycaprolactone), and today, I made it. A first attempt didn't quite work, but a second one seems like it will work. Here is the white part, together with my aluminium mould:

This little 'L' shape will face down and clip on to the battery compartment door, but I need a glue that will hold it, hold the notoriously glue-resistant material Polymorph, and stick to the glassy, glossy smooth surface of the black front of the Zoom. My best guess for a glue is Polystyrene cement, the glue I used to make Airfix models with. It's one glue I don't normally have in stock.

After making this little thing, which needed a lot of sanding and careful shaping, I got back to Gunstorm. I realised that I had no Steam Achievement for completing the full game, so I added one. This was much easier than adding the first game's 'Xodar Defeated' Achievement because I had at least programmed an end to Gunstorm II.

It's been an amazingly hard and busy couple of weeks, this Gunstorm programming. Every day filled with copying and pasting, coding, and other computer admin. This process continues, but will perhaps slow down once Gunstorm 1 & 2 are listed.

I wrote a song yesterday called 'Budgets and Voting', a satirical song with the premise that all politicians care about are those things; whether it can be afforded and whether it is popular - nothing more and nothing less. If something is affordable and popular, a politician will do it without question, and if not, will not.

Final Gunstorm Work

A horrid sleepless night, woke about 4 times due to random small noises, and at one point away for 4 hours or so. My stomach again torments me. I rose weary and groggy.

In the night I realised I had a small problem with Gunstorm and the latest engine update. Steam will sync the Options.txt file upon start and exit, to keep it up to date, but if synced at the start, it would overwrite any custom changes made by the user before the game was run. Editing these options can be used by expert users to customise the game intimately - most particularly screen resolution. If not synced (as in previous games) then this information may be overwritten with each update. This isn't too bad, as these things are only overwritten if a forced update to 'verify' files is done, and these tweaks are easily remade anyway, but it's still not ideal. Here, as in Taskforce, we have mission progress to keep track of; not something we would want to lose.

So some data needs to be persistent, and some editable. So in the night I worked out a solution: two files, one editable which is never saved, so can be freely toyed with, and one for settings which is always saved and up to date. This solves many long-standing problems, as some settings like screen resolution shouldn't really be saved anyway, and it would be best if other data like level progress isn't editable or visible to players at all.

In the morning I added this feature and it worked, so it's now part of the Hector v1.32 engine. I'll add this to my other games when I update those.

These changes took most of the morning, including uploading them to Steam and testing them in situ. One other benefit is that the persistent file doesn't have to be present to start with. It will be saved out at the end, and read from if it is there, but if not, defaults used and a new file created. This suits cloud-synching perfectly.

After those changes, I converted and uploaded the Gunstorm II videos. In the afternoon I put Trax together and released that on my itch.io channel, as planned. At about 5pm, Gunstorm was approved for release, so I made the store live and linked to it, and scheduled the new gameplay videos.

These jobs feel like a never ending treadmill, but such is life in creative works like this. I'll soon prepare things for Gunstorm II, then updates to some older games.

Paul is here; staying for a few days while his partner is away and his boat is being serviced. I'm still reading the Patrick Stewart book and feeling inspired by it. I told myself at one point "Yes! By the time I'm 40 I'll have 'made it' too!" - but of course that was many years ago. Perhaps I'll be a breakthrough success at 60-something then. I wish I could relax, or eat, or both.

Gunstorm 1 Complete

The remaster of Gunstorm is just about complete and everything is now working and ready on Steam. I now need to wait for the official approval process, which can take a week or so, then I'll get going with Gunstorm II. It's been a huge amount of work.

The digital process reminds me a bit of contemporary music. Perhaps games have pioneered the way that digital culture is created and vended, but the other arts have rapidly followed suit. Now, thousands of games are released weekly (or daily?), but much of the content is mediocre.

An elephant in the room is automation. AI created games and content that is as poor as books written by AI. Nobody likes this sort of stuff; it's rubbish, but it's 'better than nothing' so will can catch on a little. AI created content is nowhere near a threat to art or artists, the problem is that its sheer quantity and utter rubbishness can drown good art by enthusiasts. This is really sad. I recall now how the Amiga PD Scene ('public domain') of games was indeed full of rather poor things, but all hand made and lovingly made by hobbyists. The automation factor may now lead to an explosion of huge amounts of very similar, poor quality content. It's odd that even the real products sold by Amazon exhibit this feature. One will often find the same camera or sound recorder or tripod, looking identical to 10 others, but with a different brand name.

Well, my games are different because they're from a different era, and I utterly despise and reject AI content. As with my music I've never used 3rd-party game-engines or plugins; everything I make is my own from scratch, which is why my games takes so long and are so much work. The treadmill of using other's engines isn't that much less work though, because things keep changing and 'upgrading' every few months. This dispiriting aspect of technology drove me as crazy as coding does generally. My nerves and body can't cope with programming for long. The process is too exacting, too intense. Programming is like making a house of cards anew each day; an ultra-delicate process, always knowing it's quivering structure must remain intact, and that a collapse means doom and disaster. All programmers feel this; its a neurosis created by computers which has infected the human population as a whole. It's little exaggeration to say that everyone I know as Asperger's Syndrome or ADHD (usually both); but they don't, it's a computer neurosis caused by the social influence of electronic minds.

After Gunstorm, I had thought about updating Bool or Firefly (or both at once), but that can perhaps wait. Having checked, the original Gunstorm game sold 4 copies, and the sequel 8. This update is a much better game, but I expect similar results. I've made it quickly, and made it available, which was my key aim. The game is part of my art, now an odd hybrid between the first decade of the 21st century and its third. I may update Future Snooker and Future Pool with the new engine at some point, but now I'm exhausted and ready to file things.

Here is Xodar, in his new High Definition, wide-screen form:

Deb said that the game was transformed compared to the old version, and it is. Some features are there, and now work correctly; like controller support and an end-game sequence. Both games are now as good as each other. Many of the gameplay features from Gunstorm II are now in Gunstorm I, but the first game has some unique elements too. The second lacks a 'continue' for the classic game, for example, or the Asteroids game.

One game I've not mentioned is Outliner. The new updates to Gunstorm have rather made it obsolete in gameplay. It was always a budget variant of these games (I've made lots of this type over the years: Roton, Xenex, Outliner on Amiga; and Roton, Outliner, Gunstorm 1 & 2, and the Flatspace training - it's all part of the same genre). Aside from its style (of course, style is vital, style is the essence of art - not content - it's absolutely true so say that a bad note played with élan is better than the right note played timidly, and the same applies in all art) Outliner's unique feature are its two-player options, which only Xenex on Amiga had. Xodar, the villain in Gunstorm, incidentally owes the inspiration for his name to Xenex.

Gunstorm Finalising

A final main day of Gunstorm programming. One change was updating the main menu system to make it easier to set the main controls using a controller. There was a panic moment when a right-click froze my engine skeleton, but it turned out to be an ever-present lockout bug due to the main menu system.

The big job today was adding Steam support to the code, which is now largely in, but I must add the achievements. The store page has been started, with 23rd February 2024 set as the release date.

Once the game works and once the store is live an approved, I'll do the same for Gunstorm II.

More Gunstorming

Nearly at the end of my Gunstorm marathon. Today I recorded the main gameplay videos - the first time I've done this on my new computer (well, apart from taking the SFXEngine videos, but that was a Windows Desktop program). This took (and takes) a lot of time, as the gameplay has to be about right, and show a reasonably large amount of the game. Then the videos need converting then editing. Both games have 4 videos each, each of about 3 mins. Shorter is better.

I also needed to take the screenshots of the games, though this is yet to do on Gusntorm II. I've also re-done the Gunstorm II Steam graphics:

It's hard to make the 'II' glow exactly the same way as the main title, as this was composited from the actual game colour and alpha maps. These new graphics look better. They have a darker fade to the edge, and uses the correct 'nebulae' for this game.

I also tested and got working the game controller input. The controls were labelled wrong, so that needed fixing. These are translated too, so each key (300+) needed translations into French and German.

I'm feeling stressed and uncomfortable, overloaded with things to do, but the end is in sight. The next steps are the Gunstorm II screenshots, then the Steam integration programming.

I've decided to release Trax as it is on itch.io at some point. This was my first ever 3D game, my first after over a decade of making 2D games on the Dragon 32, the Commodore 64, the Amiga. The game itself is not great, though a suitable update to Burnout, my last Amiga game, and could and should ultimately be better than that game at least. It does, however, look and act worse than almost all of my other 3D games, partly because it was my first game of that sort. It would be quite a lot of work to update to modern standards, and largely pointless work - why update a poor game? It would be like taking a bad film and working on an expensive 'digital remaster' of it. Unlike films, however, I could improve the game itself as I worked.

Still, this, if I ever update it at all, will be at the bottom of the list to re-work. Breakout Velocity and Fallout will probably never be updated because a new game that mixes bits of both would be easier and better in every respect.

The current (ancient) version of the game does run on my 2024 Windows 11 PC, so I may as well put that on itch.

Gunstorm Work, Patrick Stewart, A Walk In The Countryside

A sleepless night of stomach pain and nightmares. At times I can feel quite despondent at these random bouts of illness which last all night.

This, however, led into a full day of work on Gunstorm 1 & 2. The primary jobs were Steam graphics for the store pages, this sort of thing:

There are about 15 graphics of specific sizes to create. This takes a remarkably long time; longer than formatting the manual.

I've also made a few little changes to the games. Gunstorm 1 now shows a "Press Space to skip" message during the Xodar intro, as Gunstorm II does. Pressing Esc or Space will skip, though not fire as you may want to blast away at Xodar's ship. Fire will skip in Gunstorm II however, as it's a standard in that game that fire skips all text screens. I also fixed the language selection, and several smaller things like optimising the nebula scrolling.

The changes are growing smaller and smaller, and sometimes backtracking, which shows that he end is nigh for the design. It's amazing how long it's all taken, I've made at least 100 changes to both games, which were supposedly 'finished' when I started. I've yet to test either with game controllers, or add any Steam integration. There won't be online stats/highscores stored because these are too easy to hack and fake, but there will be achievements for defeating Xodar, and for each eschelon of Gunstar points attained.

I've continued to read the Patrick Stewart book with happiness. I can relate to much, but also realise with sadness that there are elements of my personality that are very flawed compared to most humans. I remained silent and alone until I was well over 30, trained to be fearful of being with humans. Pat had done and experienced more by 19 than I had by 40. Still, the book attractively oozes enthusiasm for acting and I found myself reading out loud the Shakespeare quotes.

In other news, the remastered A Walk In The Countryside was launched yesterday, and the primary video of The Cat Phone Song. It has already had more views than the old (many years old) one. My videos are, gradually but certainly, more popular as each new one is released. The video for 'I Think You Love Me' has had over 300 views in just over two weeks, and is one of my all-time most popular for music, and there is a clear trend of newer videos, newer music, growing in popularity.

Gunstorm Continues

Two full days of work on Gunstorm 1 & 2, both technical upgrades and adding features. Lots of new features added to Gunstorm in particular, adding features that were present in Gunstorm II, like follow-the-cursor mode, and the ability for fixed or random level layout. A new icon and logo for both games:

This itself was a challenge to create. It was rendered in the game itself because the texturing is complex to match, and this meant creating a hi-res version of the texture and lights. Then, re-creating in high resolution all of the backgrounds, the stars and nebulae, and the backdrops for Gunstorm II. Here is old vs. new for Gunstorm:

All created using Genetica 3 (which is apparently obsolete today, but this old dog likes this old trick). Star-fields can be tricky things in games. They can 'glitter' if too high resolution, as can other textures. Like anything aesthetic, these changes all involve a lot of testing, trying, tweaking, and this takes time.

Today, more work, and changes to the Marrowmore Minerunner game in Gunstorm II. I also created the pdf manual. Once the look is finalised (it needs a little more work), I can take screenshots, a video, and work on the Steam graphics. I've been working on this for one week; quick, but I can't be quick enough. I think these are great games, some of the best I've made, but I always think that, and I'm not liable to sell many of these, not a week's wages worth. Each day spent on them feels good, addictive, and these, my work, need to be 'out there' for the world to see and discover, but I know that the thrill of working on a game can be a poisoned chalice, and that I can spend weeks of my life on these things, this introspective activity. I'm starting to feel the need to move on, so I must work faster and harder to complete these, and then the other games.

Onwards we must charge.

Bug Hunting

A restless night, running over in my head the possibilities and plan of attack for combatting this new bug. I have an array of techniques for finding a bug, but this one was unusual in that it had a specific result - a freeze after about 1 second of running, and only about 20 or 25% of the time. The main program seemed to keep running in the background, so it was primarily a display problem.

First I found old copies of my engine and tested those. Again the same problem; so this wasn't caused by recent changes. Then I set up a key-press to play a sound. This proved that when the graphics were frozen the main game loop was indeed running, but at a crawl of about one frame per second. By this stage, I'd ruled out it being a timer problem, and by flagging off various lines, had ruled out it being pretty much anything to do with my code, it must be a system problem.

I tested Gunstorm 1 & 2 last night on Deb's computer and it worked fine. Then, today, I tested it on various resolutions. They all worked apart from when selecting the desktop resolution. The start-up was different too; the screen paused and went notably black for about half a second when starting normally, but when the desktop resolution was chosen, it jumped straight in to the game, and then the bug appeared: About 25% of the time, it would visually freeze. Curiouser and curiouser.

I tried switching screenmode in the program while it was frozen (blessed that the main loop kept running, so the keys would respond). This worked, it re-awakened the program. Then I tried resetting the screen device, and this too fixed things, actually restoring the program in the correct resolution - so I had a fix. But a fix like that would be no comfort to a player. Having to press a key to wake up a dead game isn't a feasible solution, even if it's a rare event.

So, I wondered if I could start in a different resolution, then switch to the desktop one. I made it start in 640x480 (still a standard for graphics cards, but nobody would have a Windows Desktop of that size), then switch to the final one. This worked! The screen went black for half a second as though resetting, then everything started and seemed (seems!) stable. So, the bug is either a fault in the DirectX9 implementation on Windows 11, or a driver fault. Resetting the display fixes it, so it appears that 'changing' to the current resolution doesn't act correctly, doesn't reset or flush data or something like that.

Now, its not ideal to change resolution twice every time, it's two screenmode changes in quick succession, and graphics cards or monitors might not like this, but there's no easy way to avoid it. I can test if the user selects desktop resolution, but can't test if the 'best' (or any other) screenmode is the desktop resolution because a screenmode is only confirmed as valid by actually trying it, and by then it would be too late.

So the best option is indeed to do this every time, but I've added a new option, 'robustinit', which can be switched off to use the old behaviour of a single jump into the correct mode.

So, 24 frantic and full hours spent on this bug. Now I can continue with the game updates proper.

Programming Hell

Hellish hellish hellish day. The worst nightmare in programming is a spontaneous, unexplained and untrackable bug magically appearing from nowhere, and this has afflicted Gunstorm II. About 25% of the time, the game starts 'frozen' with a white screen, locked about 6 loops in. I couldn't explain it and flagged off lines to track down what might be causing it. In the end, I flagged everything off and it still happened, about 25% of the time.

Then the same thing appeared in Gunstorm, and in my basic Skeleton, the root of all of my games! I'm at a loss and have spend all day, endless hours running and re-running things, trying to find it, trying to stop it. Part of me thought that it was nothing to do with me, but a security trap (recalling the random 'black screen' bugs in Taskforce, which were caused by Windows Defender).

But this doesn't feel like that. It seems that part of the program does run, when frozen, the menus still sound and the exit key works, but at very slowly, 2 seconds per loop. The screen won't update though so I can't tell if sprites are moving or other things are happening.

Utterly dispiriting. If I can't fix it then all of my 2024 plans for game remastered are cancelled. This idiotic bug is so fundamental that I'd expect it to be in all of my games: Future Snooker and Pool, Taskforce, Flatspace, yet I can't remember experiencing it. Very odd. Very frustrating.

Hellish.

Gun Storming

A full day of Gunstorm updates. Some take along time for slow or little result, some are faster. The game now has a hi-res font with all characters, and better lives and spider-bomb indicators. I've removed the now irrelevant graphics options, and all demo modes. I fixed one bug with the random numbers; this was an engine bug which wasn't in the game before the 'upgrade'.

Two aspects of gameplay have changed. First the enemies will appear when an old one is killed as in the new Roton remaster - this much improves the game, makes it more exciting. I've also set the maximum game speed to 200%, rather than 100%, which makes basic Gunstorm more fun. I'll increase the speed on Asteroids I think, as this game is a bit too easy; I managed to get to level 15 with ease. I'll also increase the automatic firing rate to stop the incessant clicking.

Mike Drew came round to drop off two faulty Zoom recorders. One has a faulty on switch, definitely corroded, as a contact cleaner fixes it, but only for a time, and a firm press in certain ways seems to work, but most presses don't seem to work. The tiny switch is welded onto the tiny circuit board, so an ideal fix of a replacement switch isn't easy. I haven't looked at the second device yet.

He shared some of him music. He needs to record more, store more, file more!

Game Filing

A full day, but not a hue amount ticked off the list.

It was below zero overnight and next door's dog woke me at 4:30 with a bark. I didn't resleep. I thought about Doom, and how revoloutionary it was as a game, that nobody before it could have imagined a whole new genre of game about to explode onto the world. This made me think of a new game idea, something rather different than anything I've made before. The technical aspects of it are very difficult because part of the concept is infinity, but there are engine similarities with Taskforce. Perhaps I'll investigate, but I'm not sure.

This at least shows that my gaming brain has been enlivened a little.

I started the day with a big list, first filing the existing textures for Gunstorm 1 & 2 to prepare for new ones. I tested my 'Skeleton' better and found and fixed a small error concered with UFT-8 vs ANSI text files. Then I started to file, but things went a little awry. I've filed my projects in a general way like this:

CxA-Gamename (code and name of the project)
-Gamename (a folder which contains the full game version)
-Source (a folder with source code)
--Gamename (the source code, named after the game)
--Bitmap (art, if wha have some)
---Gamename (the game name again, so I can easily drag it to a useful folder)
--Other files...

But the standard was not consistent. Textures were sometimes filed with other game art, and Steam Versions needed a duplicate 'full' (or full and demo) versions, but duplicating all of the files is not efficient, so only parts were duplicated. Then there were old Amiga files...

Ultimately, I decided to develop new standards for filing the 91 projects I have archived, and this has taken all day. I now list:

CxA-Gamename
-DistributionWindows (or DistributionAmiga, or DistributionSteam) (various final game files)
-Source
--Codev100 (version number or designation of the code filed here, some games had files older versions which might be required)
--Graphics
---Bitmap
---ILBM (for Amiga games)
---Imagine (or any other graphic formats or programs)
--Sound
---Prometheus
---Tracks (for final wavs)
--Tools (subfolders with specific tools, level editors etc.)


So this process has taken all day, but prepared the way for future updates. Filing is vital for efficiency.

The only change to the games was to set the perspective correctly for narrow and widescreen, and adjust as needed. It means that Gunstorm now has a much bigger gameplay area. I may need to adjust the zoom.

The big job will be reworking the graphics. For Future Pool and Future Snooker I didn't update anything apart from the tables. This may suffice, updating only the backgrounds.

Hector v131, Textfile v102

Sigh, a huge and very full day, endlessly working on, and testing, the most tedious of things: text processing. The original class I used on Gunstorm II, and all games prior, supported 127 characters at most - a char, a signed byte. At some point recently, probably for the Taskforce remaster, I've upgraded all of this to support over 150 characters; a complete set of European language lettering to support just about every language apart from complex ideographical languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc.

Today, my plan was to update this text class. It was in need of an update, there were lots of potential crashes and a definite lack of null-pointer checks. But little bugs kept appearing, just little annoyances. Crossing the 127 limit made the char values negative, so I used little internal unsigned variables to check and adjust things if the bytes needed inspection, but the whole thing was too complicated. Gunstorm used the old 127 limit, so didn't really need an update, but I really should update ALL games to the latest thing, and every game should be simple enough and robust enough to cope with an upgrade.

So in the end I switched to using unsigned bytes throughout, which makes far more sense, but it meant rewriting routines to print text, measure text, and complete complex substitutions (controls like 'fire', 'thrust' can be substituted with the keyboard key).

This has taken all day, a day prone to finding silly bugs on an hourly basis. As soon as I thought it was all fixed, new errors would appear. This is why game developers tend to use off-the-shelf engines; it saves hours of bug-hunting for simple things like text processing. Yet, off-the-shelf engines can be full of bugs too. I can't tolerate any bugs. I really try to fix every single one.

One other job was to translate the full possible set of keys, including joypad controls, 'shoulder' buttons and that sort of thing. The new controls have been there a while, but never translated into French or German, so I did that.

So ends day two of these game conversions and all I've done is upgrade the engine to a basic level. Almost all of the day was updating (and fixing) the main engine rather than adding those changes to the games. Both games are now running using the ancient graphics, and 22050hz wav sound. Both games still have 'demo' versions, links to buy from Share-It (remember them! that dastardly company that sold my games and sound effects for over 10 years, then deleted my entire catalogue and kicked me off without warning when the sales dried up for a month or two), and other things that need removing and updating for a Steam release.

My head is spinning.

My mouth is healing well, and aside from a tinny taste I can practically speak and eat like a normal human.

The next jobs are to file the current set of legacy graphics (I wonder if they could form some sort of option for customers - DLC?) before I update them all to at least double the resolution.

I've been musing on how to improve the other games; Bool, Firefly, and Breakout Velocity. So far, I've generally updated the look and sound of my old games, but not really changed the gameplay much. I think these games need a revamp too - they need to be made better. Breakout Velocity could do with a new name, and perhaps combining with Fallout. Firefly, a Pac-Man clone, might work in 3D first person, that might be interesting, and all games could use some algorithmic level generation.

Arcangel may be the most difficult to get working, partly because it would need an ancient size of screen, probably 640x480 pixels. As a 2D bitmap game, it can't be upgraded for modern computers without redrawing the graphics, and that took a year or so originally, with painstaking help from Andrew. This is my oldest code. My first Windows game was Thermonuclear Domination, but I've lost the source code to that, so the Arcangel is ancient and liable to be full of bugs and things that have been long since superseded. That fact, and my suicidally unhappy associations with this doomed project, causes me to delay work on it.

Gunstorm and Gunstorm II Remastering

Finalised the Gmail backups and organising, and decided to look at Gunstorm and Gunstorm II.

Looks like I updated Gunstorm a few years ago (I had totally forgotten that), but it still needed quite a few changes to get it working in Visual Studio 2022, with the latest incarnation of my engine.

Gunstorm II was another story and, this, my last game and therefore the technical highlight of my classic period, hasn't been touched since August 2008. It's taken all day to get it working, but now it does. The graphics are at least half the resolution they need to be, and upgrading the controls has proven difficult, as the latest version of my game engine involves a choice of 512 controls: 256 for the keyboard, plus others for mouse, game controllers etc. Before this I used 'unused' keys for those 'virtual' keys, but with just one or two game controllers those spare keys can disappear quickly.

I'll spend tomorrow updating the basic game engine and my C++ classes, as it, the DirectX9 Skeleton I use, is already in need of an upgrade. My little changes to the older games that I've refurbished, Radioactive and Taskforce, have updated some aspects of it, so I'll need to do that first. Martian Rover Patrol and Roton were my most recent programming projects, but they were 2D so don't really count, but there are bound to have been changes there too. I rememeber the nightmarish time with graphical glitches in Martian Rover Patrol. I can't remember anything about the bug or its soloution. My mind is certianly going, so perhaps it's good to make these games workable while I can. After the engine is updated I can fully update Gunstorm and Gunstorm II.

It's a big learning (or rather re-learning) curve. I've encountered about 9 regular 'bugs' concerned with compiling the old code. I do hope that DirectX9 remains supported forever. It would be a pain to update everything to the latest thing. Well, people still play Commodore64 games, so there is hope.

It will at least make things more stable and easier to upgrade if I can get my old games up to the approximately same standard.

Email Archiving, Old Games

A full and intense day archiving my Gmail, a backup procedure I've generally neglected. Until now, to save space rather than preserve data, I've sought out emails beyond seven years (chosen because it's the storage requirement for tax purposes), and deleted certain classes of email from that period, such as files over a certain size ("older:2015 larger:3Mb") or similar, but this is haphazard as I had no set rules or standards of what to keep and what not. In particular, small emails are often not worth keeping.

Most of the emails I receive are notifications, often automated of the 'no reply' sort. With any online order there is also a slew of emails; the order placed, an invoice, a delivery notification, a 'delivered' notification. I generally kept those as a record of what I bought and when, but in my ancient text-based backups (I have text emails going back to 2000), I only included conversations and not notifications. It seems over-cautious to keep records of purchases, akin to filing receipts from local shops; and online orders are often preserved anyway - Amazon's are at least. For unusual items, I often make a personal note or review of what I bought and how good it was anyway, so there's less and less of a case for keeping these sorts of email.

I also filed the occasional newsletter, or press release, or even (shudder) mp3 attachments sent to me for ArtsLab. Nowadays I'm much more aggressive when it comes to culling mail. I tend to download attachments and delete the email. It's a great shame that we can't delete attachments but keep the text.

So the day started by using Gmail searches "newer:2015 older:2016" for example to sort emails by year, then creating a label for each year. Then searching each big email and deleting any that don't need to be that big. Generally every email over 2Mb is deleted anyway, and those over 1Mb scrutinised for important content that I want to file. I had 2000 emails a year in the 2010s, but now it's more like 1000; partly because I delete more, partly because I'm less social and less e-social these days.

Then I started to delete, and have decided to delete most or all of the notification type emails; many of which are from the big tech companies like Amazon, eBay, Google. I'll keep last year's from them, but beyond that the information they convey is minimal. For anything I purchase that may be used in financial records, like invoices, I'll now download and file all of those. I often do that anyway, but can keep a second copy in email - not any more.

Newsletters, offers, posters, art or poetry competition forms are deleted, and perhaps filed under their event. If I'm sent images, those are also filed separately, so there's no need to keep an email too.

After this, Google Takeout can be used to download each year, one tedious year at a time. I prefer it that way rather the one giant block. It makes it easier to add a neat new file to the archive each year. Not sure how much space this has save me overall, perhaps half a Gb.

It's amazing how huge the Gmail email archives are. My text emails from 2014, the last year I stored them 'by hand', amount to 13.9Mb. The Gmail archive is 141Mb! Ten times bigger for the same thing.

Doing all of this filtering for the years 2015 to 2021 has taken all day, and the process is not complete. It's hard to be sure that this is a worthwhile job, but filing and organising is a fundamental purpose of life. I expect that nobody else does this, and I expect that in 100 years time (if you are reading this, reader of that future), my email record might be one of the few that still survives, but who can say? I might be wasting my time, but there's no harm in preserving such data, the most intersting and culturally important of which will, perhaps, be my every day conversations with friends.

Soon, to other jobs. Perhaps 2024 is the year I finally put my old games on Steam. Gunstorm II is an obvious choice, being my lasts and most techncally proficient game, although it's a plain-old shooter. There's probably more of a case of it than Future Pool or Snooker being on Steam, but what held me up is that I'd really need to release the first Gunstorm game first, and that's merely average. All of this costs a lot of money and the chance of getting it back slimmer than ever, but this is a cultural investment and in the long term is likely to break even. Other games that need releasing are: Bool, Breakout Velocity, it's sequel Fallout (I could probably combine both into one game), Firefly, Trax (which is very old and never been revamped), Arcangel (similarly ancient, and never released at its best), Outliner (one of my favourite to play, yet simplest games).

Effervescent Intro, Frames

A slow and low day of continuing mouth pain, but things seem to be improving. Most of the pain seems to be my left tonsil, always a problematical one as it has a calcified 'stone' there, which hurts whenever I have an infection of some sort; though this ache can function as a sort of 'early warning system' for colds etc.

I added a new intro to Effervescent, but later in the day removed it. Many songs now have more feeling based, more improvisatory intros that echo the main theme. I made this one because it sounded nice, and because Effervescent is rather short; but perhaps this is overkill, akin to some baroque curves in a carving. I could use it elsewhere or include it as second track instead.

I also worked on some very old sequences, a rock tune called 'Cat Covid', and another surreal track full of energy in the style of the some of The Dusty Mirror songs called 'Walls (And How To Hit Them)'. The Cat Covid one is a bit silly, and there only because it's a bit silly, as well as being largely complete.

Linda came round to drop off a gift of some old picture frames, and, though it was painful to talk, we happily talked a little about painting. I miss painting and exhibiting. It's hard to feel like an artist when I have no place to show my work and no people to share it with. I increasingly dislike showing things online. The ephemerality of it all worries me philosophically, so oil painting trumps my music in this regard. Yet so much of the visual art world seems to be internet based too. If it were not, how would most people hear of it?

I spent a happy hour removing the faded prints from the frames, and cleaning them from their sticky tapes using a hairdryer and a solvent called Goo Gone; making them ready for new oils. A new frame and a blank canvas is a wonderful gift - there's no better one, apart from a commission or a competition.

I've wasted too much time browsing Wikipedia, reading about Dennis Potter. I watched the rest of Casablanca, a film I've never seen, but one certainly worth seeing as its reputation indicates. Some of today was even spent in a semi-sleepy stupor which is most unlike me. Things will get back to normal when my mouth and face doesn't ache so much, and when I have a million thrilling tasks rather than vague notions of one or two.

Mouth Pain, F.I.G. Live, and Ponderous Notation

A slow but steady day. My mouth and left side of my throat is in such pain that it's difficult to focus on anything else, but I managed a few jobs.

First revamping our Fall in Green live videos a bit. There are lots, but many aren't public on YouTube, so these will now start to appear every Friday at 7pm.

Then I did some work on a logo for my music publishing arm, which doesn't yet exist. I occasionally list works as published by 'Cornutopia Music Publishing', on PPL for example, but the music isn't technically 'published' in sheet form, or registered with the PRS as published. When I do publish the sheet music it gives me the opportunity to fix a name so I may choose a different one. 'Cornutopia' is a long and meaningless word, taken originally from an Amiga module (tune); a happy melody, so it was a cross between Cornucopia and Utopia.

In the afternoon, I scored the music for the new Ponderous Tomes composition for Fall in Green, although my mouth pain grew over the day so motivation became difficult due to this.

We had some good news in that Deb's site magically came back. I'd half hoped this would be the case, that a technical error over the holiday wouldn't be noticed or corrected until this morning. In the afternoon, things gradually came back, making the experience a valuable lesson and rehearsal for possible future problems. The internet is so very ephemeral. I wonder if the thousands of great artworks (and the millions of bad ones) of this generation will be lost forever in a mere century's time because so much is online only and very vulnerable.

Christmas and New Year Notes

A nice Christmas Day 2 with Deb on the 30th, starting with a the discovery that the Crewe Library Winter Party was in the Crewe Chronicle, a full page article:

At 8pm on the 30th, the new $19.99 version of SFXEngine was launched on Steam, so the evening had to be spent at home working but the technical parts were not difficult as I'd prepared for them. The $100 version was plagued by illegitimate buy-and-refund attacks, with a spattering genuine fraud, over $40,000 worth in November, which were incredibly dispiriting. I had aimed, in 2023, to release Argus too, but those attacks had scuppered that. I still hope to release Argus there one day and must keep aiming high.

New Year's Eve began with some awful news, Ink Pantry vanished from the net along with every other Falcoda website. She has paid for 2-years hosting and the domain but we've no idea how to gain back the site or her domain. Deb has a sole backup from May (10 year's worth, so important) but everything since might be lost. This is an ongoing situation that is affecting hundreds of people. For me, the day started with my annual computer backups, but the rest of the day was spent with Deb too. We visited a few shops and watched the film The Killers over the two days; the best scene by far is the diner scene at the start. My thoughts were constantly about the technical aspects of her site being lost.

New Year's Day was more relaxing, full of little annual jobs like updating my website for the new year. How my paintings there from the past few years make me cringe! They look far better in real life. Every time I visit I'm reminded why I spent so much of 2023 making lights for their photography, which I haven't yet used). Another job to do.

I can now barely speak or eat as my tongue spontaneously blood-blistered on the left side on the 29th. This seems to happen at random every so often, and I know that this means about 10 days of pain as this heals.

I've decided to rest a little, with more small jobs. I am a little physically under the weather. This has been one of my healthiest festive periods, with little extravagant food and only sips of alcohol, but I've barely stopped working or paused to rest and I've often felt exhausted.

2024 is a foreboding year. When I ask my instincts about the future, the year 2024 keeps appearing; good or bad who can say? I feel optimistic as I always do. The economic and political portents are not good, but lights shine best in the darkness. 2023 was one of my best years in many ways. My two album releases were my most popular, following steady learning steps of albums, each a little more popular than the former, and I performed my first live songs in years. The months October, November and December were highlights, with our first Words & Music Festival performance with Carol Ann Duffy, and the popular and enjoyable Snow Business project. And across 2023, I completed a lot of sheet music. I've now scored 15 album's worth of music, with 24 to do.

It is a time for plans. Onward we march.